Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant hitched a ride on Artemis 1

“Alexa, how far are we from Earth?

“Presently, Orion is 204,066 miles away from Earth and 230,986 miles away from the Moon.”

No, Amazon’s digital voice assistant hasn’t misplaced the plot; Alexa hitched a trip on the Orion spacecraft. Following a profitable launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission this week, Alexa is at the moment hurtling towards the Moon.

“Alexa, how briskly are we going?

“Orion’s present relative velocity to Earth is 3,281 miles per hour.”

Earlier this summer season, on the day Artemis I used to be initially scheduled to launch, I spent an hour testing out the capabilities of this new deep house voice assistant down on the bottom at Kennedy Area Middle in Florida.

Whereas this was a demo mannequin (they wouldn’t let me within the spacecraft — I requested), so far as I might inform, it was an actual duplicate of the one on Orion, even right down to the shortage of an web connection.

My first impression was, “Wow, that is one speedy voice assistant.” It responded to instructions in milliseconds — when it acknowledged them appropriately; sure, there’s nonetheless that downside.

This pace is as a result of Amazon engineers developed a completely native Alexa for Orion — there’s no cloud in house (properly, not a dependable one). Area Alexa is totally self-sufficient, one thing I’d like to see in Amazon’s Earth model. In addition to with the ability to reply sooner, a cloud-free Alexa would cut back among the privateness considerations round a wise speaker in your house.

I can safely predict that’s not going to occur. Amazon’s cloud servers present Earth Alexa with roughly 80 p.c of its options. However that pace might come to an Alexa close to you for at the very least some fundamental features.

“We [plan] to reuse the native voice expertise we’ve developed on present Earth functions,” Philippe Lantin, principal options architect for Alexa Voice Service, informed me. “Alexa on Orion can reply 1000’s of queries regionally, so we’re reusing a few of that data to construct higher voice fashions.”

Native voice management is at the moment an possibility with a couple of Echo gadgets for sure instructions, and Lantin mentioned they’re increasing that.

My second impression was: this factor is large.

How on Earth will they discover room for it on a spacecraft? NASA is just not sending an Echo Dot into deep house. As an alternative, Lockheed Martin (who constructed Orion) developed a particular — and really massive — spacesuit for the voice assistant’s software program. 

“We needed to construct an Alexa from the bottom up as an ordinary Echo in all probability wouldn’t survive the launch,” mentioned Brian Jones, an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin and the person who first got here up with this concept.

Alexa shares its spacesuit — which is definitely a big blue panel designed to resist the trials of house journey — with a 2020 Apple iPad working Cisco’s Webex software program. (It’s all kumbaya in house.) 

That giant blue panel is known as Callisto, and its technical time period is payload — since you “pay” to “load” it on the rocket. And don’t you are concerned. Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Cisco utterly footed the invoice to ship this Frankensteinian creation of shopper tech to the Moon.

Presently, Callisto is sitting the place the astronauts’ controls will probably be on future crewed missions, as Artemis I is uncrewed. Clearly, it’s not going there if it ever will get to trip together with an actual crew. If that occurs, it’s going to get a {hardware} redesign, mentioned Jones. 

Neither the iPad nor Alexa is definitely linked to Orion’s techniques. “NASA was very specific,” defined Jones. “Thou shalt not command the automobile in any approach, below any circumstances.”

As an alternative, NASA allowed Callisto to put in a subsystem of Orion’s flight software program to check how Alexa might present flight telemetry knowledge to a crew and discover the potential effectiveness of voice management for future crewed missions. 

However wait, don’t spacecraft have already got voice management? No.

“There’s positively an expectation among the many normal public that these automobiles have voice-control expertise on board already,” Justin Nikolaus, lead voice UX designer at Amazon Alexa, informed me. “There have been experiments, however there isn’t an AI on board simply ready to reply all of your questions like there’s in science fiction.” 

This was the issue Amazon got down to clear up. However even with Callisto on board Artemis, they’re nonetheless light-years away from a critical answer. Voice person interfaces are tremendous laborious, and nobody’s nailed them right here on Earth, not to mention in house, the place expertise must be fail-safe. However somebody has to take that first small step.

Nikolaus and his workforce have been engaged on growing a model of Amazon’s voice assistant for house since 2018. The completed product is just a expertise demonstration — it has no management in anyway over Orion.

Surprisingly, it’s actually not that completely different from the AI in your lounge. It could possibly inform unhealthy jokes (“What occurred when the astronaut stepped in gum? He received caught in Orbit”), play some music, set timers and alarms, and switch lights on and off (particular lights constructed into Callisto, not the precise spacecraft lights). 

These features are all extra restricted than Earth Alexa — as each command and response needs to be preprogrammed — however they are often tailor-made for each mission. For instance, the crew’s favourite tunes might all be preloaded on house Alexa.

Area Alexa may pull real-time telemetry knowledge from Orion’s software program to relay over 100,000 completely different knowledge factors on Orion and, when linked to NASA’s Deep Area Community (NASA’s web connection), announce the most recent sports activities scores and information and add objects to your procuring record. Sure, when and if it will get to go together with astronauts on board, the crew might add milk to their procuring record. (They may need to choose the shelf-stable model.) 

The advantage of all that is precisely the identical as it’s on Earth: hands-free voice management is tremendous handy. “Astronauts are extraordinarily busy on board, and if you’re attempting to multitask, voice is a good automobile for info retrieval,” mentioned Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa at Amazon. “We’re bringing Star Trek’s ‘Pc’ to actuality,” he mentioned proudly. “We see an enormous function for AI sooner or later in house, and that is primarily the primary proof level.”

Actuality test. We’re nonetheless an extended, good distance out and much, far-off from something resembling Star Trek’s “Pc.” The primary hurdle is seeing if Alexa can present these imagined advantages to astronauts in house. Or will the voice assistant’s presence be a barely annoying novelty? (Because it at the moment is in lots of houses on Earth.)

Throughout the Artemis I mission, testers will ship instructions to Alexa from Houston, utilizing a speaker to relay the instructions as if a crewmember had been saying them. Onboard cameras will seize the integrations. Nikolaus is hoping it’s going to exhibit the methods the voice assistant can enhance the standard of life for astronauts throughout their mission in addition to make them extra productive.

“A crew’s time in house is extraordinarily costly,” he mentioned. An hour of a crewmember’s time on the ISS is $130,000. “Having the ability to interface the automobile as many various methods as potential can save time, and voice is a kind of methods.”

The Callisto workforce interviewed astronauts and NASA engineers to grasp what could be most helpful to them. Jones mentioned that everybody they spoke to was “universally intrigued” by the concept of voice management. Though clearly, there was loads of skepticism. 

“Nobody was snug with working any mission-critical instructions — Alexa is just not going to open the pod bay doorways,” mentioned Jones. “However turning on the lights, setting timers and alarms. That’s handy and never scary.”

The flight telemetry knowledge might have some use: they may ask Alexa to test cabin stress, temperature, oxygen ranges, and so on., reasonably than a display. The voice assistant might additionally assist as they transfer via procedures and experiments by studying out the subsequent step to an astronaut in order that they don’t have to drag out the pocket book Velcroed to their leg. 

Callisto is just not the primary try to ship experimental tech into house. Who can overlook the robotic Astrobees (weirdly analogous to Roombas), the “holoporting” physician, and CIMON, the AI house robotic that was stupidly creepy (and partially constructed by IBM)? 

However the final objective right here is to breed an Alexa in house with all the identical capabilities because the Alexa in your sitting room. Whether or not that’s one which promptly and appropriately responds to your each command or the one which generally thinks I requested it to blast Okay-pop via my home when all I mentioned was to set a kitchen timer — properly, we should wait and see. 

However there was one factor I needed to test earlier than house Alexa set off on its journey to the distant retrograde orbit:

“Alexa, open the pod bay doorways.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do this.”